Kerry's Momentum
Can Bush Stop It?
Andrew Sullivan
Presidential campaigns have issues; and they have candidates; and they have polls. But they also have something intangible called momentum. And that's what John Kerry has right now.
In the eight days since the first debate, you can feel the Democrat slowly gaining what the first president Bush called the "Big Mo." The polls have turned around in as little as a week from a clear and growing Bush lead into what is, by most measurements, a tie. That's a very striking shift this late in the game and the Bush-Cheney campaign tried all week to reverse or stall it. And they failed.
The first attempt to stem the new Democratic direction came in the vice-presidential debate. A seated, snarly Cheney ripped the bark of John Edwards, firing up the Republican base, and achieving what many called a win. But Edwards quietly more than held his own. He artfully redirected Cheney's constant jibes into positive plugs for his own views; he smiled and retained composure. My own impression was that Edwards easily won the debate on substance, but I was in a minority. No one, however, believed that the debate changed the direction of the election as a whole. Vice-presidential debates never do.
And so last Friday night, you saw the president give it all he's got. Bush was immeasurably better both in substance and style than he had been the week before - mostly coherent, energetic and even eloquent at times. On abortion, Iraq, and even stem cell research, he was strong, and even moving. But he was so intent on appearing back in control that he veered at times toward over-aggression, almost shouting his answers at the audience, interrupting the moderator by yelling over him, and throwing around the "liberal" label at Kerry with the abandon of a slightly desperate man. He tried to get the debate back onto Kerry's undistinguished and generally left-wing domestic record. "You can but you can't hide," Bush said twice in what was obviously designed to be the soundbite that endured.
But the problem was: Kerry certainly didn't seem too liberal. He emphasized fiscal responsibility more effectively than Bush did. He promised to add 40,000 new troops to the military. He vowed to restore old traditions of global coalitions. Stylistically, he was serene. If Bush stomped around the stage, Kerry glided. He was more detailed than the president in exactly what he was planning to do in Iraq - something that particularly appeals to skeptical undecided voters. In an odd twist, the president said that Kerry's plan in Iraq was essentially a copy of the Bush plan. In that case, why would a vote for Kerry be so damaging to the war on terror? Immediate polling gave the debate narrowly to Kerry. Some focus groups were even more pro-Kerry. Bush's far stronger performance undoubtedly reassured his base, and rescued Republican morale. And morale is undoubtedly important. But, again, it didn't stop the Kerry momentum. And that's grim news for the Bush campaign.
More damaging, however, than Kerry's unexpectedly resilient debate performances are what Harold MacMillan once famously called "events, dear boy, events." The week began with a leaked private speech by L. Paul Bremer, Bush's hand-picked head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Bremer told his audience that "the single most important change - the one thing that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation. He revealed that he had asked Washington to send more troops and had been turned down. He also said that insufficient troop levels had meant critical weapons sites had been left unguarded in the early days of the invasion. The White House dutifully got Bremer to write an op-ed saying he supported the president's Iraq policy - but the damage had been done. Bush's right-hand man had admitted that the war strategy had been flawed from the very beginning. To make matters worse, National Review, a reliably pro-Bush political magazine, ran a cover story, summing up the new consensus about the Iraq occupation. Its headline: "What Went Wrong?" When your own side is asking questions like that three weeks before an election, you're in trouble.
And then the Duelfer report provided another body-blow. The fundamental rationale for the war - the threat from Saddam's existing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction - was declared wrong by the president's own study group. Yes, you can still argue that the decision to go to war was still the right one. I certainly would. But you simply cannot argue that the Bush administration's central rationale has been borne out. On the contrary. It has been demolished. It's very hard for a president to recover from that. and what it has done is essentially remove from Bush's candidacy the benefit of the doubt. He has to earn people's trust again. And Bush, who has lived in a bubble of self-reinforcing support for four years, seems somewhat baffled as to how to do that. He seems to have forgotten how to reach that skeptical, undecided voter. In last Friday's debate, his response was therefore simply to say what he has said in the past - but louder.
And that was also the undeniable inference from both Cheney's and Bush's performances. They were geared toward firing up their base. Cheney pulled no punches. Bush came out swinging. But neither tried to charm anyone in the middle. When asked to name three mistakes he had made as president, Bush couldn't name one. A little humility would go a long way at this point, but Bush seems unable to summon it up. Edwards and Kerry, meanwhile, were clearly aiming for the independent, undecided, female voter. Edwards congratulated Cheney on the way he has loved his gay daughter. He supported Cheney in the war on Afghanistan. Kerry tried to portray himself as a fiscal conservative who would not raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000 a year. They worked against type. That's a sign of confidence.
And then the final employment numbers before the election showed an increase only half of expectations. It's foolish to believe that the U.S. economy is in deep trouble. The unemployment rate is the same as it was in 1996 when Bill Clinton won re-election in a landslide. But in a few critical swing states - like Ohio - the middle class is worried and increasingly squeezed. Bush remains the first president since the 1920s to preside over a net loss of jobs in his term of office. Again, you can defend his policies nonetheless. But it's hard to get around statistics like that. Eventually, they stick. And they are. The same goes for a huge and growing deficit, abetted by vast new spending. in the Friday debate, Bush was asked to account for it. It was obvious that he couldn't.
It's worth recalling at this point that very few incumbent presidents get re-elected by a narrow margin. They tend to get back in a landslide - Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Or they lose badly - Carter, Bush 1. The current neck-and-neck in the polls is therefore unlikely to be the final result. Someone may well break out in the next couple of weeks. The polls still show undecideds heavily in favor of Kerry. And registration is at record levels, suggesting a heavy turnout. Maybe the news will improve for Bush; maybe the next debate will turn things around. But if I were Karl Rove, I'd be worried right now. Democrats have long argued that John Kerry is a strong closer. I'm beginning to see why.
October 10, 2004, Sunday Times.
copyright © 2000, 2004 Andrew Sullivan
|
